Lovecraft slowly shedding cult status

Image in the public domain, obtained from Wikimedia Commons

Author H.P. Lovecraft in 1915.

Author H.P. Lovecraft in 1915. (Image in the public domain, obtained from Wikimedia Commons)

Jake Austen

Earlier this month the pre-Halloween episode of “The Simpsons” opened with an elaborate three-minute segment directed by Guillermo del Toro, in which Bart joyfully skateboards up the tentacle of a gruesome, towering creature, its eight eyes seemingly ablaze with evil. However, as the 10-year-old rolls off the behemoth onto a Springfield sidewalk, one of the monster's smaller tentacles reveals the beast to be sharing a pleasant tea party with his “father,” a dignified, somewhat weary-looking gentleman in a gray suit.

While this is not the first time pulp horror author H.P. Lovecraft and his dreadful Cthulhu have appeared in animation, it may be the one that most thrilled Lovecraft fans, many of whom see it as a significant step in Lovecraft's long, slow march out of cultdom. A survey of this year's Lovecraft revivals may bolster their hopes. I.N.J. Culbard released a new volume in his successful series of graphic novels based on Lovecraft tales, two feature films were released (the remake of "The Evil Dead," featuring Lovecraft's creation the Necronomicon, and an adaptation of his 1926 story "Cool Air"), and a Kickstarter campaign to create a new edition of the perennially popular role playing game Call of Cthulhu surpassed its $40,000 goal by more than a half a million dollars. This year — in addition to the H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival and Cthulhu Con, held in both Portland, Ore., and Los Angeles — the largest Lovecraft convention yet, NecronomiCon, drew more than 1,200 chill-seekers in the writer's native Providence, R.I.

But in an era when more than 10 times as many fans flock to San Diego's Comic-Con, it seems surprising that Lovecraft is not better known. As one of the most important names in horror and fantasy fiction since the 1920s, generations of creators have drawn from his chilling stories, including writers as diverse as Jorge Luis Borges, Stephen King and Michael Chabon (who even has a Lovecraft-inspired pseudonym/alter ego, "August Van Zorn").

To the general public, Lovecraft remains, at best, a vaguely familiar name, known mostly through references by better-known artists. At a time when preschoolers memorize the arcane intricacies of the Marvel Universe and frat boys can draw maps of Middle Earth, Lovecraft's mythology still seems to be coveted only by the most hardcore horror/fantasy/sci-fi fanatics.

"His work has a sort of built in cultish aspect," said Peter Straub, editor of Library of America's hefty "H.P. Lovecraft: Tales" (Norton will publish a new annotated Lovecraft collection next year). "It involves an ancient race of beings that all have very peculiar names, some of them with apostrophes in them, that are deliberately unpronounceable by human beings. And a lot of people don't like his style. He was an autodidact who really fancied 19th century writing. His writing has a very odd and idiosyncratic kind of emotional power, as it involves dread and is made up of a really layered complexity."

Aaron Vanek, who was a student at Columbia College in 1995 when he made his first film, a Lovecraft adaptation (he's since adapted four more Lovecraft tales), agrees: "He had a style that isn't easily accessible for everyone. He's using polysyllabic adjectives multiple times, he leaves gaps in his stories that requires readers to make leaps of closure, and he doesn't describe his monsters. All this requires a certain degree of literacy above and beyond an 8th grade reading level. You've got to get up, maybe, to 9th grade."

The ambiguity and mystery in Lovecraft's prose that may alienate some readers is exactly what makes his work so seductive to creative types, including Culbard, whose graphic novel adaptation of "The Shadow Out of Time" was just released. Culbard's earlier adaptation, "At the Mountains of Madness," has gone through multiple printings.

"There's a lot of appeal to adapting Lovecraft's work," wrote Culbard in an email from his U.K. home. "There's just so much room, so much opportunity to use one's own voice. Lovecraft's work is incredibly open to dramatization, characterization, interpretation."

But in reading Culbard's handsome volumes it's easy to see how even his clean-line comics approach — an accessible style that falls somewhere between those of David Mazzucchelli and Hergé — could be intimidating to less literary-minded readers. Long passages of wordless explorations are balanced against dense blocks of Lovecraft's text, and "action" scenes of dignified gentleman discussing cosmic mysteries outweigh those of monster confrontations.

Further complicating Lovecraft's reception are splits within his devoted following. A thorough study of his work convinced Straub that some of Lovecraft's more purple prose (that has repelled academics for decades) can be attributed to his posthumous editor, August Derleth, who completed a number of stories after the author's death at age 46 in 1937. To some, Derleth's literary crimes go beyond ostentatious punctuation. Although the complicated cosmic mythology, with well-mapped continuity and an arcane structure, is one of the most appealing aspects of Lovecraft's work to many cultists, Brian Callahan, director of the Portland festival, disagrees.

"The idea of a structured 'Cthulhu Mythos,'" he said, "came later with the interpretations of Derleth, who essentially got it all wrong by suggesting that Lovecraft's colossal and horrible entities are all part of some cosmic war against each other, sometimes using humans as pawns. For Lovecraft, they were disparate beings of immense power who might destroy us as a human steps on an ant … probably without realizing it, and certainly with little malicious intent. For what do ants matter to gods?"

Despite this schism (or minor nerd fight, if you're an outsider), some offer highly un-Lovecraftian optimism about their hero reaching the next level of popularity. Straub cites the publication of his collection as a step toward canonization, noting that "there were no dismissive reviews, although I didn't notice any Academy doors swinging open."

"There is," he adds, "a movement in the academic world toward the inclusion of gothic writing and contemporary genre writing, and Lovecraft will always have a place in those canons, though not in the conventional literary canon, especially as formulated by English professors."

Lovecraft will find a larger audience, said Vanek, who is also founder of the Los Angeles Lovecraft Film Festival. It's notable that Lovecraft role playing games have always been more popular than video games based on his work, and that the Lovecraftian movies most embraced by the masses ("The Evil Dead" series, "The Cabin in the Woods," "Alien") reference his creations or style instead of adapting his stories.

"Will he ever reach the heights and levels of Tolkien or J.K. Rowling? No. Will every kid have a Lovecraft collection next to Harry Potter? No. His work is too inherently dark, ultimately it's about the destruction of the human race and our cosmic insignificance, so that is not going to appeal to everyone. But there's certainly room for growth."

A vast swath of Lovecraftians consider "The Simpsons" segment a tease for something they think could raise their hero out of the genre-fiction ghetto for good: Since 2006, del Toro has been working on a big screen adaptation of "At the Mountains of Madness," at one point lining up James Cameron, Tom Cruise and some money from Universal to make the film. Various factors (including the director's insistence upon an R rating) have shelved the project so far, but the "Pan's Labyrinth" auteur continues to talk up his dream project.

"Where things stand now," Vanek says, "the nerds won. We're totally in control of the dominant culture. So sooner or later Lovecraft's time is going to come. We don't have the equivalent of 'The Avengers' or 'Dark Knight' series, but give Guillermo another shot and maybe we will."

Until then, Lovecraft's followers are content with more modest signs of progress, such as the continuously diversifying festival audiences. "We get 'Doctor Who' and comic book fans," Callahan says, "but most of our audience are literary and well-read, between 20 and 70 years of age. I myself am a fan of horror movies, but many Lovecraftians don't care for them, because they don't view Lovecraft as someone who shares a genre with the likes of Dracula, Frankenstein or Freddy. They think of him as the innovator of a serious literary genre."

"Of course," Callahan adds, "some are just in it for the tentacles."

Jake Austen is editor of Roctober magazine and co-author of "Darkest America: Black Minstrelsy from Slavery to Hip-Hop." He lives in Chicago.

The Call of the Cthulhu

An excerpt:

There were legends of a hidden lake unglimpsed by mortal sight, in which dwelt a huge, formless white polypous thing with luminous eyes; and squatters whispered that bat-winged devils flew up out of caverns in inner earth to worship it at midnight. They said it had been there before D'Iberville, before La Salle, before the Indians, and before even the wholesome beasts and birds of the woods. It was nightmare itself, and to see it was to die. But it made men dream, and so they knew enough to keep away. The present voodoo orgy was, indeed, on the merest fringe of this abhorred area, but that location was bad enough; hence perhaps the very place of the worship had terrified the squatters more than the shocking sounds and incidents.

Only poetry or madness could do justice to the noises heard by Legrasse's men as they ploughed on through the black morass toward the red glare and the muffled tom-toms. There are vocal qualities peculiar to men, and vocal qualities peculiar to beasts; and it is terrible to hear the one when the source should yield the other. Animal fury and orgiastic licence here whipped themselves to daemoniac heights by howls and squawking ecstasies that tore and reverberated through those nighted woods like pestilential tempests from the gulfs of hell. Now and then the less organised ululation would cease, and from what seemed a well-drilled chorus of hoarse voices would rise in sing-song chant that hideous phrase or ritual:

"Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn."

Then the men, having reached a spot where the trees were thinner, came suddenly in sight of the spectacle itself. Four of them reeled, one fainted, and two were shaken into a frantic cry which the mad cacophony of the orgy fortunately deadened. Legrasse dashed swamp water on the face of the fainting man, and all stood trembling and nearly hypnotised with horror.